There’s been a lot of development related to Google Assistant in the last few days. First, Google provided an update for AIY Projects, with their AIY Projects Voice Kit now available for pre-order on Micro Center for $35 including a Raspberry Pi 3 board, making the kit virtually free, although you may also purchase it. Note that Micro Center blocks traffic originating from some countries, so I had to use Zend2 to access the site. [Update 10/09/2017: You can also get it from Seeed Studio for worldwide shipping]

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Google also announced the Speech Commands Dataset with 65,000 one-second long utterances of 30 short words, which they are in the process of integrating with the next release of the Voice Kit, and will allow the devices to respond to voice commands without the need for an Internet connection. So if you lose your Internet connection, or want to isolate your Voice Kit from it, you can still perform simple tasks like turning on/off lights without an Internet connection.

In this first blog post, the company also showcased some projects based on the Voice Kit, and encouraged the community to provide input for the next version with Hackster.io, or showcase your work on social networks using #AIYprojects hash tag.

The next day, Google published another blog post explaining Google Home, eligible Android phones, iPhones, Google Allo and Android Wear, will soon be joined by third party speakers supporting Google Assistant and supporting the same features like answering requests, playing music, and controlling appliances. One day later a bunch of announcements was made at IFA 2017, and the company updated their blog post with some list of 3rd party Google Assistant Speakers all scheduled to launch by the end of the year, or early 2018: